Jewish Peace News (JPN) is an information service that circulates news clippings, analyses, editorial commentary, and action alerts concerning the Israel / Palestine conflict. We work to promote a just resolution to the conflict; we believe that the cause of both peace and justice will be served when Israel ends the occupation, withdrawing completely from the Palestinian territories and finding a solution to the Palestinian refugee crisis within the framework of international law.

Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Nora Barrows-Friedman interviewed Ramallah-based lawyer and former PLO advisor Diana Buttu about the US sponsored direct talks between the Palestinian Authority and Israeli Government representatives.

Diana Buttu points out the isolation of Fatah from other factions of the PLO, and the increasingly authoritarian behavior of Mahmoud Abbas:

"... Mahmoud Abbas is the same man who hijacked Palestinian elections a year and a half ago, when he unilaterally declared that his term was extended. This is the same man who has failed to hold the Palestinian Legislative Council elections. This is the same individual who has canceled the municipal elections, all under the guise of, "oh, this is too difficult right now."

So it is not at all surprising that Mahmoud Abbas, speaking on behalf of Mahmoud Abbas, comes forward and declares that the PLO has accepted such talks when they haven't..."

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Some protest actions strike a nerve in unexpected ways. For me (and I suspect for many others) Ilana Hammerman's act of smuggling 3 young Palestinians into Israel, so that they can have a fun day, and then writing about it, has done so. We all know that Palestinians in the Occupied Territories live lives deprived of many things we take for granted. But Hammerman's action created a strong emotional experience around one aspect of this deprivation. Hundreds of Israelis are planning to follow suit.

NAZARETH, ISRAEL // Nearly 600 Israelis have signed up for a campaign of civil disobedience, vowing to risk jail to smuggle Palestinian women and children into Israel for a brief taste of life outside the occupied West Bank.

The Israelis say they have been inspired by the example of Ilana Hammerman, a writer who is threatened with prosecution after publishing an article in which she admitted breaking the law to bring three Palestinian teenagers into Israel for a day out.

Ms Hammerman said she wanted to give the young women, who had never left the West Bank, "some fun" and a chance to see the Mediterranean for the first time.

Her story has shocked many Israelis and led to a police investigation after right-wing groups called for her to be tried for security offences.

It is illegal to transport Palestinians through checkpoints into Israel without a permit, which few can obtain. If tried and found guilty, Ms Hammerman could be fined and face up to two years in jail.

But Israelis joining the campaign say they will not be put off by threats of imprisonment.

Last month, a group of 11 Israeli women joined Ms Hammerman in repeating her act of civil disobedience, driving a dozen Palestinian women and four children, including a baby, through a checkpoint into Israel.

The Israeli women say they are planning mass "smugglings" of Palestinians into Israel over the coming weeks.

"The Palestinians who join us are mainly looking to have a good time after years of confinement under the occupation, but for us what is most important is our act of defiance," said Ofra Lyth, who helped establish an online forum of supporters after attending a speech by Ms Hammerman.

"We want to overturn this immoral law that gives rights to Jews to move freely around while keeping Palestinians imprisoned in their towns and villages," she said, referring to regulations that bar most Palestinians in the occupied territories from entering Israel, and Israelis from assisting them. Exceptions are made for Palestinians with permits, sometimes issued for a medical emergency or to some labourers with security clearances.

For the Palestinian women, though, it is not about making a statement or defying an unjust law, according to Ms Lyth.

"The Palestinian women tell us: 'Go ahead and make your political point, but for us we're breaking the law so that we can enjoy ourselves and remember how life was before the checkpoints and the wall.' One woman told me: 'I just want to be able to breathe again'."

For Palestinians in the West Bank, it is not often easy to breathe. The territory is home to a growing population of 300,000 Jews in more than 100 settlements. The settlers are able to drive into Israel on roads that the army oversees with checkpoints.

It was through one such settler crossing, near Beitar Ilit, south of Jerusalem, that Ms Hammerman took the three Palestinian teenagers this year.

For their protection, she has not identifed the young women or the West Bank village where they live. She refers to the women as Aya, Lin and Yasmin. They, too, could face jail for breaking the law.

In Ms Hammerman's article, published in Haaretz newspaper in May, she admitted that she was aware her actions were illegal.

She told the women, who were 18 and 19, to take off their hijabs for the day and dress in western-style clothes to avoid attracting attention from soldiers at the checkpoint. She also taught them an easy Hebrew phrase Hakull beseder, or "Everything is okay" – in case a soldier spoke to them.

She then took them on a tour of Tel Aviv, visiting the city's university, a museum, a shopping mall and the beach, which she noted none of them had ever seen even though it is only about 40km from their village.

Ms Hammerman wrote that the only dangerous moment during the trip was when a plain-clothes policeman stopped them and asked for the women's identity cards. Ms Hammerman lied to the officer, telling him that the women were Palestinians from East Jerusalem and therefore entitled to enter Israel.

In June, Yehuda Weinstein, the attorney general, was reported to have approved a police investigation of Ms Hammerman after a settler organisation, the Legal Forum for the Land of Israel, complained.

The ranks of Ms Hammerman's supporters have swollen since the group placed an advertisement, titled "We refuse to obey", in Haaretz this month. The ad said the group was "acting in the spirit of Martin Luther King", the US civil rights leader, and demanded that Palestinians be treated as "human beings, not terrorists".

Over the past week, the online forum has attracted more than 590 Israelis signing up to repeat Ms Hammerman's act of civil disobedience.

"That has really surprised and encouraged me," she said. "I did not realise there were so many other Israelis who have had enough of this outrageous law."

Still, the coverage of Ms Hammerman and her supporters in the Israeli media has been largely hostile. During a television interview last week, she was accused of endangering Israelis with her trips. The show's host, Yaron London, asked whether she had inspected the Palestinian women's underclothes for explosives before allowing them into her car.

She will will not be deterred, though. She said the group had discussed future trips for Palestinians, including taking them to pray at al-Aqsa, the mosque in Jerusalem that has been inaccessible to most Palestinians for at least a decade, and visits to Palestinian relatives they cannot see in Jerusalem and Israel.

"We need to get Israelis meeting Palestinians again, having fun with them and seeing that they are human beings with the same rights as us."

She said her immediate goal was to kick-start a discussion among Israelis about the legality and morality of Israel's laws and challenge the public's "blind obedience" to authority.

Ms Lyth added that the Palestinian women "who have gone on our trips are the heroes of their village. They and their families know they are taking a big risk in breaking the law, but harassment is part of their daily lives anyway".

Saturday, August 21, 2010

This article describes the chronology of events surrounding the project aiming to build an islamic center in the vicinity of "Ground Zero".I found it is especially interesting because it shows how a local, modest, and initially uncontroversial project could become a major tool for pushing islamophobia once sufficiently unprincipled shakers and movers got hold of it. The scary part, of course, isn't that someopportunistic nitwits would try to make hay of such a project, but the fact that they've been having such enormous success.

2009: A Muslim organization having arranged to purchase an abandoned Burlington Coat factory on Park Place in Lower Manhattan plans to build a 13-story Islamic community center. It will feature a culinary school, conference hall, basketball court, swimming pool, and place of worship among other things and while principally servicing the Muslim community be open to all. It is to be called the Cordoba House, an apparent allusion to Muslim Spain in which Islam flourished alongside Christianity and Judaism from the eighth century up to the "Reconquest."

In its mission statement the group says the center "will be dedicated to pluralism, service, arts and culture, education and empowerment, appreciation for our city and a deep respect for our planet. [It] will join New York to the world, offering a welcoming community center with multiple points of entry. With world-class facilities, a global scope and strong local roots, [the center] will offer a friendly and accessible platform for conversations across our identities."

It will be four big city blocks away from where the World Trade Center once stood ("Ground Zero"). But since there are already about eight mosques in Manhattan, and a significant Muslim population in that highly diverse section of New York City, there is nothing remarkable about the group's application to tear down the old factory building and construct the center.

The key organizer, Kuwait-born Feisal Abdul Rauf, is an imam of the Sufi school of Islam, generally described as "moderate" and mystical. He holds a degree in physics from Columbia University, had been hired by the FBI to conduct sensitivity training among their agents, and had worked with the U.S. State Department. He had met New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg, who strongly supports the plan for the center.

In December 2009 the New York Times runs an article on the project. It is generally positive, citing two Jewish leaders and the mother of a 9-11 victim in support. In the same month conservative commentator Laura Ingraham, guest-hosting FOX News' "The O'Reilly Factor," interviews Rauf's wife, Daisy Khan. The interview is as Salon's Justin Elliot later notes "remarkable for its cordiality." "I can't find many people who really have a problem with [the project], declares Ingraham. "I like what you're trying to do."

On May 6, 2010, after a public hearing in which New Yorkers express strong feelings pro and con, the New York City community board committee unanimously votes to approve the project. Enter Pamela Geller, who maintains a blog called Atlas Shrugs. She has written a book about Barack Obama in which she alleges his real father was Malcolm X. She leads an apparently tiny wacko group called Stop the Islamization of America. Seeing the opportunity to have her moment in the sun (and she is soon interviewed by FOX News and CNN), she lashes out at Cordoba House. She declares on her blog, "this is not about religious liberty. No one has suggested abridging the First Amendment to stop the mosque, and to oppose the Ground Zero mosque is not to oppose the First Amendment. There are hundreds of mosques in New York, thousands in America. This is not a religious issue. This is an issue of national dignity and respect for those who were murdered at that site in the name of Islam." She begins toorganize a protest at the Park Place site.

Soon New York Post columnist Andrea Peyser references Geller's group, falsely describing it as a "human rights group." This brings the movement against the "Ground Zero mosque" out of the blogosphere and into the mainstream press. She sensationalizes the issue, falsely reporting that the center is to open on Sept. 11, 2011. A "controversy" erupts.

On July 16 Sarah Palin weighs in. Addressing not Muslims specifically but "Peaceful New Yorkers," Sarah Palin twittered: " pls refudiate [sic] the Ground Zero mosque plan if you believe catastrophic pain caused @ Twin Towers site is too raw, too real." She adds two days later (after ammending "refudiate" to "refute"), "Ground Zero mosque is UNNECESSARY provocation; it stabs hearts. . ." Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich expresses outrage in multiple statements over the next month: "There should be no mosque near Ground Zero in New York so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia." "It's not about religion," he insists, "and is clearly an aggressive act that is offensive." He says the center will be a symbol of Muslim "triumphalism," and that building the mosque near the site of the 9/11 attacks "would be like putting a Nazi sign next to the Holocaust Museum."

He writes, "'Cordoba House' is a deliberately insulting term. It refers to Cordoba, Spain–the capital of Muslim conquerors, who symbolized their victory over the Christian Spaniards by transforming a church there into the world's third-largest mosque complex... every Islamist in the world recognizes Cordoba as a symbol of Islamic conquest." In response to this absurb allegation the center organizers change the name to "Park51."

(Gingrich who postures as an historian and scholar might have noted the Visigothic church was purchased by the conquering emir after 718 and that the Arabs during their rule in Spain pursued a policy of far greater religious tolerance than the Christians had before them. They allowed churches and synagogues to operate freely. When the Christians regained power, they expelled all Jews and Muslims, or forced them to convert, and conducted the Spanish Inquisition.)

Republican politicians smelling blood and opportunity continue to lash out. Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty says, "I think it's inappropriate... From a patriotic standpoint, it's hallowed ground, it's sacred ground, and we should respect that. We shouldn't have images or activities that degrade or disrespect that in any way." Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee asks on his FOX program August 4, "Even if the Muslims have the right to build it, don't they do more to serve the public interest by exercising the responsible judgment to not build it?" "The fact that someone has the right to do something doesn't necessarily make it the right thing to do," echoed Ohio Rep. John Boehner.

Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney's spokesman adds: "Governor Romney opposes the construction of the mosque at Ground Zero. The wishes of the families of the deceased and the potential for extremists to use the mosque for global recruiting and propaganda compel rejection of this site."

On August 13 President Obama hosts representatives of the Muslim community at the White House. "As a citizen," he tells them, "and as president, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as everyone else in this country. That includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances. This is America, and our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakable."

A Republican running for Congress in Maryland, Andrew Harris, denounces the statement: "He is thinking like a lawyer and not an American, making declarations without America's best interest in mind." Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., also responds immediately: "President Obama is wrong. It is insensitive and uncaring for the Muslim community to build a mosque in the shadow of ground zero."

Bob Schieffer, CBS News' chief Washington correspondent observes that Obama's attention to the mosque issue "elevates it to a national issue. Clearly, Republicans are trying to take every advantage of this they can... every single Democratic candidate now running for office is going to be asked about it."

Democratic Party leaders quickly distance themselves from the president's remarks. . "The First Amendment protects freedom of religion," says a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid adding that the senator "respects that but thinks that the mosque should be built someplace else."

Obama himself, startled by the response to his comments, has to elaborate almost immediately. "I was not commenting, and I will not comment," he said, "on the wisdom of making the decision to put a mosque there. I was commenting very specifically on the right people have that dates back to our founding. That's what our country is about."

A CNN poll published in August 11 shows 68% of Americans opposed to the center, and a FOX poll published August 13 shows that 61% of U.S. residents support the legal right to construct Park 51 but 64% don't want the Muslim group to construct it. This becomes the mandatory position of all politicians: they've got a right to do it, but they shouldn't. It would not be politically wise to suggest a general ban on mosques or Islamic community centers. But everyone has to say, this particular project is wrong because it shows insensitivity to the feelings of "Americans" particularly family members of the 9-11 victims. Justin Quinn, who maintains the "U.S. Conservative Politics Blog" for example, justifies his disapproval by suggesting the building will hurt "thousands of people who continue to mourn the loss of loved ones who were turned to dust in the attacks."

But there is another issue as well. New York gubernatorial candidate Rick Lazio, Gingrich, and Quinn all call for an investigation of the center's funding, suggesting that some of it might come from "Islamic terrorists." Lazio speaks ominously about the "the questionable backers of the Cordoba Mosque at Ground Zero" and calls for a public investigation. Quinn says, "let's at least find out where the money is coming from to pay for this thing." Soon House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is on board the program, although, alarmed at the backlash from Obama's remarks, she suggests the "anti-mosque" movement should also be investigated.

By innuendo they assert that Rauf is linked to international terrorism. That seems unlikely since he's been hired by the FBI since 2001 to offer sensitivity training to agents and has also just been asked by the State Department recently to tour the Middle East to "foster greater understanding" about the U.S. and its Muslims.

The charge seems based solely on the fact that in a June 2010 interview with Aaron Klein of New York's WABC Radio, he declined to say whether he agreed with the listing of Hamas as a "terrorist organization."

He declined to do, replying, "I'm not a politician. I try to avoid the issues. The issue of terrorism is a very complex question.... I'm a bridge builder. I define my work as a bridge builder. I do not want to be placed, nor do I accept to be placed in a position of being put in a position where I am the target of one side or another."

(I see nothing damning here. Hamas, initially promoted by Israel as an alternative to secular Palestinian nationalism, has resisted Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands. It maintained long-term ceasefires with Israel ended due to Israeli action. It won a fair election in 2006. The U.S. State Department has considered it a "terrorist organization" since at least 1994 but the European Union only added it to its blacklist in 2003 under U.S. pressure. Many people including former President Jimmy Carter have asked that it be removed from that list, which is highly political and arbitrary and under no meaningful Congressional oversight. A U.S. Appeals Court recently ruled that the State Department must review its decision to list the People's Mujahadeen Organization of Iran as "terrorist." These things are very political, and no one should demand that Rauf endorse the listing. Certainly not those opposed to "Big Government" and its expectations of passive obedience from thecitizenry.)

There are also wild accusations (aside from Gingrich's cited above) that the center is designed to rub 9-11 in our noses. "The mosque at Ground Zero," Quinn insists, "is being pursued to prove a simple political point -- that Islamic fundamentalists can knock our buildings down, murder our citizens and then use our own laws against us so they can laugh in our faces."

There are also hateful, provocative comments. Tea Party Express leader Mark Williams blogs his followers: "The monument would consist of a Mosque for the worship of the terrorists' monkey-god (repeat: 'the terrorists' monkey-god." if you feel that fits a description of Allah then that is your own deep-seated emotional baggage not mine, talk to the terrorists who use Allah as their excuse and the Muslims who apologize for and rationalize them) and a 'cultural center' to propagandize for the extermination of all things not approved by their cult. It is a project of American Society for Muslim Advancement and the Cordoba Initiative, essentially the same group of apologists (but under 2 different names) for terrorists and the animals who use it as a terrorist ideology. They cloak their evil with new age gibberish that suggests Islam is just misunderstood."

* * *

Thus by mid-August a modest project by a mainstream U.S. Muslim group backed by the New York City mayor and unanimously approved by the New York City community committee has been transformed into a general attack on Muslim rights in this country. The scary thing is that disapproval is so widespread, bipartisan, and driven by irrational fear if not hatred.

What does this tell us about this country? It tells us that nine years after 9-11 (and nice centuries after the First Crusade), Islamophobia is rampant and politically useful. Even though U.S. troops are supposedly fighting to help Muslims in two countries and both Bush and Obama have officially (for whatever reasons) emphasized that the U.S. is not against Islam, Islam is a religion of peace, we value our Muslim citizens, etc. the "us vs. them" mentality remains strong.

The prevalent argument against the center---that it may hurt people's feelings---is an argument that people should be hurt by the mere existence of an Islamic site near "Ground Zero." That they should feel hurt at the site of a Muslim establishment as they walk around Lower Manhattan, associating it with the 9-11 hijackers. That they should conflate Mohamed Atta and Rauf, or that at least if they do, their feelings should be respected. Of course Rauf's hope is to counter precisely such feels by encouraging understanding and dialogue. (The fact in any case is that according to an August 10 Marist poll only 31% of Manhattan residents oppose the center!)

What about the feelings of U.S. Muslims, including those who had family members perish in the 9-11 bombing? They read about the plans of the "Dove World Outreach Center" in Gainesville, Florida---a "New Testament church, based on the Bible"---to promote an "International Burn a Quran Day" this September 11. They read about anti-mosque campaigns in Murfreesboro, Tennessee; Temecula, California; Sheboygan, Wisconsin. The Tea Party movement and mainstream politicians enthusiastically embrace the anti-mosque movement. I imagine there are some hurt feelings among people unfairly associated with terrorism just because a handful of Saudis attacked the U.S. nine years ago. To be told "this sacred ground---our American ground" so we don't want your Muslim center here "degrading" and "disrespecting" it (Pawlenty's terms) is to be told you're not really a full citizen and your religion (as opposed to, say, Catholicism) isn't an American one. It must be insulting.

The notion that "they attacked us"---that the whole Muslim world attacked "us"---is so preposterous that only the simplest minds can believe it and the most devious exploit their ignorance for political gain. The U.S. has attacked Muslim countries, or intervened to impose regime change, repeatedly in the post-war period. Since 1967 it has provided nearly unconditional support to Israel, inevitably endorsing or accepting its grotesque mistreatment of the Palestinians. It cruelly maintained sanctions against Iraq throughout the 1990s, resulting in at least half a million children's deaths. It provides massive aid to hated dictators like Egypt's Hosni Mubarak. It has killed hundreds of thousands of civilians in its latest attack on Iraq. It maintains an increasingly unpopular occupation of Afghanistan and by its drone attacks on Pakistan has thoroughly alienated the Pakistani people. It is natural for Muslims globally to see themselves under U.S. attack. That a few haveresponded with terrorist attacks is unsurprising; the CIA calls it "blowback." It is also natural for most, like Rauf, to want to respond to all this with peaceful education and dialogue.

The problem isn't limited to the U.S. Other western countries are also manifesting Islamophobia, placing Muslims on the defensive. In March 2005 the French parliament voted to ban Islamic head scarves in public schools. This has forced French Muslim schoolgirls to choose between following rules set down in the Qur'an and receiving public education. In 2005 the Danish right-wing newspaper Morgenavisen Jyllands-Posten "invited members of the Danish editorial cartoonists union to draw Muhammad as they see him." Since Muslim teaching forbids depiction of the prophet, and since it was assumed many cartoons would depict him a terrorist, this was a deliberate provocation. In December 2009 Swiss voters voted in a referendum to ban further construction of minarets in the country. There are only four.

There are a lot of hurt feelings about violent attacks, and Muslims in Gaza, Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere frankly have more cause for them than the people of New York City. The loss of 2976 people on 9-11 was tragic. But more than that number of civilians were killed by U.S. bombing between October 2001 and March 2002, and the loss of life in Iraq due a war based on lies (including the Islamophobic conflation of al-Qaeda and Saddam) has been catastrophic. And there are lots of hurt feelings over discrimination, experienced throughout the western world.

The controversy over the Islamic center shows us that neither the politicians nor pundits nor people in general understand that, and so seem hell-bent on generating more Muslim resentment. Nothing good can come out of that.

Thursday, August 19, 2010

With the tacit agreement of the US administration, Netanyahu has recently okayed increased home demolitions throughout the West Bank, followed by the destruction of an entire village in the Negev. Demolitions, dispossession and displacement by Israel continue both beyond and within the "green line."

The first report and analysis below is authored by Jeff Halper of the Israeli Committee Against Home Demolitions; the second is by Haia Noah, an researcher and activist with the Negev Civil Equality and Coexistence Forum.

Rela Mazali

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RAMADAN KAREEM FROM THE NETANYAHU AND OBAMA ADMINISTRATIONS

Jeff Halper

August 11, 2010

Yesterday, the day before the Muslim holy month of Ramadan began, at 2:30 in the morning, workers sent by the Israeli authorities, protected by dozens of police, destroyed the tombstones in the last portion of the Mamilla cemetery, an historic Muslim burial ground with graves going back to the 7th Century, hitherto left untouched. The government of Israel has always been fully cognizant of the sanctity and historic significance of the site. Already in 1948, when control of the cemetery reverted to Israel, the Israeli Religious Affairs Ministry recognized Mamilla "to be one of the most prominent Muslim cemeteries, where seventy thousand Muslim warriors of [Saladin's] armies are interred along with many Muslim scholars. Israel will always know to protect and respect this site." For all that, and despite (proper) Israeli outrage when Jewish cemeteries are desecrated anywhere in the world, the dismantlement of the Mamilla cemetery has been systematic. In the 1960s "IndependencePark" was built over a portion of it; subsequently an urban road was built through it, major electrical cables were laid over graves and a parking lot constructed over yet another piece. Now some 1,500 Muslim graves have been cleared in several nighttime operations to make way for…..a $100 million Museum of Tolerance and Human Dignity, a project of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. (Ironically, Rabbi Marvin Hier, the Wiesenthal Center's Director, appeared on Fox News to express his opposition to the construction of a mosque near Ground Zero in Manhattan, because the site of the 9/11 attack "is a cemetery.")

The month-long period between Netanyahu's July 6th visit to Washington and the start of Ramadan has provided Israel with a window to "clear the table" after a frustrating hiatus on home demolitions imposed by the "old," mildly critical Obama Administration – although there is no guarantee that Israel will not demolish during Ramadan, especially if it wants to exploit the period until the November elections, knowing that until then Obama will not overtly oppose anything it does in the Occupied Territories. In fact, the process of demolishing Palestinian homes never ceased. On June 6th, for example, a year after the demolition of more than 65 structures and the forced displacement of more than 120 people, including 66 children, nine families of Khirbet Ar Ras Ahmar in the Jordan Valley, totaling 70 people, received a new round of "evacuation orders." A week later the Israeli High Court ordered the Civil Administration to "step up enforcement against illegal Palestinianstructures" in Area C, the 60% of the West Bank under full Israeli control.

And so, on July 13th, upon Netanyahu's return (Palestinian homes are not demolished without an OK from the Prime Minister's Office), three homes were demolished in the Palestinian East Jerusalem neighborhood of Issawiya, followed by three more homes in Beit Hanina. The Jerusalem Municipality also announced the planned demolition of 19 more homes in Issawiya this month. In the West Bank, the Israeli "Civil" Administration demolished 55 structures belonging to 22 Palestinian families in the Hmayer area of Al Farisiye in the northern Jordan Valley, including 22 residential tents and 30 other structures used to shelter animals and store agricultural equipment. According to the UN's Office of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA): "This week [July 14-20, the week of Netanyahu's return from Washington] there was a significant increase in the number of demolitions in Area C, with at least 86 structures demolished in the Jordan Valley and the southern West Bank, including Bethlehem andHebron districts. In 2010, at least 230 Palestinian structures have been demolished in Area C, forcibly displacing 1100 people, including 400 children. Approximately 600 others have been otherwise affected." Two-thirds of the demolitions for 2010 have occurred since Netanyahu's meeting with Obama. More than 3,000 demolition orders are outstanding in the West Bank, and up to 15,000 in Palestinian East Jerusalem.

The demolition of homes is, of course, only a small, if painful, part of the destruction Israel wreaks daily on the Palestinian population. Over the past few weeks a violent campaign has been waged against Palestinian farmers in one of the most fertile agricultural areas of the West Bank, the Baka Valley, steadily being encroached upon by large suburbs of the settlement of Kiryat Arba, in Hebron. Israel already takes 85% of the West Bank's water for its own use, either for settlements (settlers use five times more water per capita as do Palestinians, and Ma'aleh Adumim is currently building a water park in addition to its four municipal swimming pools and the huge fountains constantly flowing in the city center) or to be pumped into Israel proper – all in flagrant violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits an Occupying Power from using the resources of an occupied territory.

Accusing the farmers of "stealing water" – their own water – the Israel water company Mekorot, supported by the Civil Administration and the IDF, has in recent weeks destroyed dozens of wells, some of them ancient, and reservoirs used to collect rain water, which is also "illegal." Hundreds of hectares of agricultural land have dried up as irrigation pipes have been pulled out and confiscated by the Civil Administration. Fields of tomatoes, beans, eggplants and cucumbers are dying just before they can be harvested, and the grape industry in this rich valley is threatened with destruction. "I'm watching my life dry up before my eyes," Ata Jaber, a Palestinian farmer who has had his home demolished twice, most of whose land lies buried under the Givat Harsina neighborhood of Kiryat Arba and whose plastic drip irrigation pipes are destroyed annually by the Civil Administration just before he can harvest. "I had hoped to sell my crop for at least $2000 before Ramadan,but all is gone."

(You can see a BBC report on the destruction of Palestinian reservoirs on YouTube <Earth Report - 2003 - Conflict over water in Israel/Palestine> and a heart-rending scene filmed just a week ago when Ata's cousin was arrested in front of his small child for resisting the destruction of his water system <Hebron Palestinian Child's Torment Caught On TV>.)

Settlements continue to be built, of course. The much-trumpeted "settlement freeze" amounted to no less than a temporary lull in construction. (Indeed, Netanyahu never used the word "freeze"; in Hebrew he refers only to a "pause.") According to the August report of Peace Now's Settlement Watch, at least 600 housing units have started to be built during the freeze, in over 60 different settlements – meaning that the rate of construction is about half of that during the same period in an average year when there is no freeze. Given that the approval process has never been halted – the Israeli government announced the planned building of 1600 housing units in the settlements when Vice President Biden was visiting, if you recall – making up for lost time when the "freeze" ends in late September will be an easy task. According to Ha'aretz, some 2,700 housing units are waiting to be constructed.

The fact that the so-called settlement freeze did not really end settlement construction is obvious. The American government seems ready to accept lip-service only from Israel, as against overt and brutal threats towards the Palestinians if they do not acquiesce to the charade. Palestinian negotiators revealed last week the Obama Administration threatened to cut all ties with the Palestinian Authority, political and financial, if they continued to insist on a genuine freeze on settlements or even clear parameters on what the sides will negotiate. (Netanyahu refuses to accept even the elementary principle of the 1967 borders being the basis of talks.)

Just as destructive of any real peace process, however, is the fact that the focus on settlement freeze deflects attention from attempts by Israel to create "irreversible facts on the ground" which will defeat the very process of negotiation. Even if Israel did respect a settlement freeze, there is no demand, no expectation, absolutely nothing to prevent it from continuing to build the Wall (the enclosing of the Shuafat refugee camp inside Jerusalem and the town of Anata is being completed in these very days, and the village of Wallajeh, some of which spills into Jerusalem, is losing its lands, ancient olive trees and homes even as we speak). Nothing is preventing Israel from continuing to impoverish and imprison the Palestinian population through its twenty-year economic "closure," including the siege on Gaza, having reduced the Palestinian economy to ashes. Nothing stands in the way of completing a system of parallel (though not equal in size and quality) apartheid highways,big ones, going through Palestinian lands, for Israelis; narrow ones for Palestinians. Nothing keeps Israel from expelling Palestinian from their homes so that Jewish settlers can move in – on July 29th nine families living in the Muslim Quarter of the Old City, returning home at night from a wedding, found themselves locked out of their homes by settlers and prevented from entering by the police. (Palestinians, of course, have no legal recourse to reclaiming their properties, whole villages, towns and urban neighborhoods, farms, factories and commercial buildings, confiscated from them in 1948 and after.)

Nothing prevents Israel from terrorizing the Palestinian population, whether by its own army or the surrogate militia founded by the US and run by the Palestinian Authority to pacify its own population, whether by settlers who shoot and beat Palestinians and burn their crops with no fear of arrest, or by undercover agents, aided by thousands of Palestinian forced to become collaborators, many simply so that their children could receive medical care or so they could have a roof over their heads; whether by expulsion or the myriad administrative constraints of an invisible yet Kafkaesque system of total control and intimidation. Nothing opposes Israel's boycott of the Palestinian people, isolated from the world by Israeli-controlled borders, or policies that effectively boycott Palestinian schools and universities by preventing their proper functioning. And nothing, absolutely nothing, stops Israel from demolishing Palestinian homes – 24,000 in the Occupied Territories since 1967,and counting.

Perhaps this way of welcoming Ramadan comes at no surprise in terms of the Occupied Territories. It took on an entirely different cast when, on July 26th, more than 1,300 Israeli Border Police, the shock-troops of the police's Yassam "special operations" unit and regular police, accompanied by helicopters, descended upon the Bedouin village of al-Arakib, just north of Beer-Sheva, a community within Israel inhabited by Israeli citizens. Forty-five homes were demolished, 300 people forcibly displaced. One of the most grotesque and dismaying parts of this operation was the use of Israeli Jewish high school students, volunteers with the civil guard, to remove the belongings of their fellow citizens from their homes before the demolition. Besides reports of vandalism and contempt for their victims the students were photographed lounging in the residents' furniture in plain sight of its owners. Finally, when the bulldozers began demolishing the homes, the volunteers cheered andcelebrated. Over the next week, as Israeli activists helped the residents pick up the pieces and rebuild their homes, the Jewish National Fund, the Israeli Land Authority, the Ministry of the Interior and the "Green Patrol" of the Ministry of Agriculture (established by Ariel Sharon to prevent Bedouin "take-over" of the Negev) sent in police and bulldozers and had the village demolished twice more.

Although al-Arakib is one of 44 "unrecognized" Bedouin villages in the Negev – of which only eleven have even rudimentary education and medical services, no electricity, extremely limited access to water and none have paved roads (see http://rcuv.wordpress.com) – it is nevertheless populated by Israeli citizens, some of whom serve in the Israeli army. While demolitions of Arab homes within Israel is not a new phenomenon – last year the Israeli government demolished three times more houses of Israeli (Arab) citizens inside Israel as it did in the Occupied Territories (the destruction of up to 8,000 homes in the Gaza invasion aside) – it signifies that the term "occupation" cannot be restricted to the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza (and the Golan Heights) alone. The situation of Arab citizens of Israel is almost as insecure as that of the Palestinians of the Occupied Territories, and their exclusion from Israeli society almost as complete. While around 1,000 cities,towns and agricultural villages have been established in Israel since 1948 exclusively for Jews, not a single new Arab settlement has been established, with the exception of seven housing projects for Bedouins in the Negev where none of the residents are allowed to farm or own animals. Indeed, regulations and zoning prohibit Palestinian citizens of Israel from living on 96% of the country's land, which is reserved for Jews only.

The message of the bulldozers is clear: Israel has created one bi-national entity between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River in which one population (the Jews) has separated itself from the other (the Arabs) and instituted a regime of permanent domination. That is precisely the definition of apartheid. And the message is delivered clearly in the weeks and days leading up to Ramadan. It is papered over with fine words. Netanyahu issued a statement saying: "We mark this important month amid attempts to achieve direct peace talks with the Palestinians and to advance peace treaties with our Arab neighbors. I know you are partners in this goal and I ask for your support both in prayers and in any other joint effort to really create a peaceful and harmonious coexistence." Obama and Clinton also sent their greetings to the Muslim world, Obama observing that Ramadan "remind us of the principles that we hold in common, and Islam's role in advancing justice, progress, tolerance, andthe dignity of all human beings." Both the White House and the State Department will hold Iftar meals. But the bulldozers and other expressions of apartheid and warehousing tell a much different story.

(Jeff Halper is the Director of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD). He can be reached at <jeff@icahd.org>.)

The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions is based in Jerusalem and has chapters in the United Kingdom and the United States.

"No state representative is getting involved in the irrational saga rolling over the backs of children and people whose rights have been trampled, people forgotten by the welfare authorities. Despite the demolitions, no representative of the state in charge of citizens' welfare comes to examine the goings on." Haia Noah calls the state to order following the destruction of the village of el-Arakeeb.

Published on the Ynet news portal, 9 August 2010

The very same scenes replay, again: again a convey of police cars swoops down on some tabernacles made of wooden poles and covered with plastic sheeting, green or black, the only refuge in the Northern Negev from the sun and the hot and somewhat hellacious weather. After the Bedouin village of el-Arakeeb was demolished a week before, great forces came again last week to destroy. To destroy everything.

Again the women huddle in the remote area, and the line of men facing the policemen. Again the crying of the children and the shouting of the women, and again the arguments made by the men to the policemen. Again it is the same state clerk who orchestrates the horrific activity, claiming that the evacuation is being done lawfully. And again old Ismail asks: what sort of law is that? What law? He stands guard over the generator, to keep it from being taken as well. And another woman, whose tears mingle with the Negev dust, shouts in despair, throat parched: is this a state?

Yes, again it is the few against the many, against better odds in police forces, and the YASAM, the special police forces, and the policemen are tough and have no mercy. As if this were a natural cycle which must occur, a force of reality.

The horrific thing was that front-line policemen seemed to be enjoying the job they were doing. You can see it in their eyes, and you can see it in their treatment of the Arabs and the Jews on site. As far as they are concerned, this time there was no discrimination between Arabs and Jews. Everyone was beaten. We were all their enemy. The briefings were successful, the right people were chosen for the job.

I was there over the week, and was on the receiving end of some of the enthusiastic policemen yesterday morning. I will, of course, file a complaint with MACHASH, Police Investigation Department, but I am not naïve enough to think anything will come of it. But it is our civic duty! We must do this so that police violence will not swallow us all. So that it will not turn us into a state where the police dominates its citizens.

The police formed a cordon before us, gave us two minutes to disperse, and then one minute. Before thirty seconds went by they attacked anyone in the area. Most of us ran away. I was behind a camera and did not notice – and within a moment was thrown to the ground by the policemen and felt bad. I tried to say something to the policemen, but they must have assumed I was pretending. They demanded that I get up, but I could not.

I had a hard time breathing and lost consciousness. The policemen held onto me and dragged me. My arms clearly show the marks of this police action. I told them that I feel bad, but it did not help. They demanded that I get up and leave. I did not manage to stand up, although I tried. Finally I made it into an upright position and leaned on one of the vehicles, and then a rude policeman came, held onto me, and pushed me before I managed to collect myself. He cursed me thoroughly, using words I have no desire to repeat. I am sure that if I had used such defamation of his mother, who may be as old as I, I would swiftly be removed from the rolls of the living!

I recovered after a moment, and asked for his name and badge number. He refused to respond, but his friends, standing around him, chose to cast about the names of singers. One said his name was Eyal Golan [famous singer]. I told them that they had a duty to carry identification badges, but it was useless. This whole time they were pushing me toward the Wadi. It took me a while to recover, and then I found out that Awad Abu Farih, who has been a friend of mine for 15 years, had been beaten in his stomach and testicles, apparently by one of the commanders. Others were beaten during the evacuation and felt bad in yesterday's great heat.

I saw the director of the [Land Use] Oversight Unit, Cesar by name, shout at Awad: "You made a rude gesture to me (demonstrating it) and said you'd rebuilt, so this is our response."

A petty clerk, glad to do his work and settling his personal accounts with dozens of families that he had left in the beating sun, taking personal revenge for a gesture which may or may not have been made when tempers flared. A clerk or policeman who goes home, to his family, and tells his children about another successful day at work? That he has the power to destroy? A clerk who is just obeying orders? Did you think it would come to this? That a time would come when state clerks, policemen or others, would obey terrible orders and think that it is fine and right to act this way?

The process rolls on, seemingly held by the clerk and the police, and no state representative gets involved in the irrational saga which is trampling children, adults, people whose rights have been stomped upon, who have been forgotten by the welfare authorities. Despite the demolitions, no state representative responsible for citizen welfare comes to see what is happening. The state has abandoned us, Arabs and Jews in the Negev, to the brutal forces of District Commander Danino and his policemen. Enough! Maybe someone with sober vision will come and dig a way out of the vicious circle?

Who is behind the campaign of destruction in the Negev? Is this a government decision, slam-bang and the Bedouins will be gone? Are the police forces serving the Jewish National Fund [which was appointed by Israel's government to control much of the land in Israel] instead of the citizens as a whole? Are they motivated by lust for land?

Who is trying to set fire to the Negev?

Haia Noah is an activist in the Negev Civil Equality and Coexistence Forum.

Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Consider signing a petition in support of the Bedouin village of Al-Araqib, which was just demolished for the fourth time. You can also help by spreading the word. Thanks,Racheli.

"As American Jews and others who care deeply for Israel, we join with many Israelis, both Jewish and Arab, in raising our voices in protest at the destruction of the Bedouin village of Al-Arakib in the Negev and the forcible removal by some 1,500 Israeli police of over 300 Bedouin Israeli citizens – mostly children – leaving them homeless, expelled from their land, and bereft of their possessions.

On July 27, bulldozers from the Israel Lands Administration (ILA) demolished their homes, sheep pens, fruit orchards and olive tree groves, so that a forest can be planted on their land near Beersheva.

The residents of the village have started to rebuild their homes, but ILA bulldozers and the Israel Police have demolished the new buildings twice during the past week.

Over 2,000 Israelis have already signed a Hebrew petition to Prime Minister Netanyahu calling for an end to the destruction of Bedouin villages in Israel and a just and comprehensive solution to the plight of Israel's Bedouin Palestinian Arab citizens in the Negev. We join them in solidarity. A group of over 50 prominent scholars, artists, rabbis, writers and NGO leaders have endorsed this petition.

Please click on "Take Action" on the right side of this page, add your name and your protest message will be emailed right now to Prime Minister Netanyahu's office.

Co-sponsored by Rabbis for Human Rights-North America, Meretz USA, the Shalom Center, The Workmen's Circle/Arbeter Ring, Jewish Voice for Peace, Tikkun and the Network of Spiritual Progressives, and Tikun Olam - a big tent of groups that differ ideologically but have come together in support of this petition.

Monday, August 16, 2010

George Bisharat is a professor at Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco. Nimer Sultany is a civil rights attorney in Israel and doctoral candidate at Harvard Law School.The article attempts to make the conditions of Israeli Palestinians citizens more "real" for American readers by providing some examples of what the American constitution would look like if it resembled Israeli laws.

By George Bisharat and Nimer Sultany: Second-class citizens August 15, 2010

Should Israel be encouraged to enact legislation guaranteeing equal rights for all of its citizens as part of any peace agreement with the Palestinians?Israel's systematic discrimination against Arabs was highlighted recently whenDonna Shalala, University of Miami president and former Health and Human Services secretary, was detained for three hours, grilled and subjected to an extended luggage search upon her departure from Israel.Shalala, of Lebanese Arab descent and a long-time supporter of Israel, had visited the country with other university leaders at the invitation of the American Jewish Congress, but had stayed beyond the planned itinerary for several days. It seems evident that, despite her stature, she was a victim of profiling.But the indignities that Shalala suffered pale in comparison to those faced by the 1.3 million Palestinian citizens of Israel on a daily basis, and not just at the airport.Adalah, the Legal Center for Minority Rights in Israel, counts more than 35 Israeli laws explicitly privileging Jews over non-Jews. Other Israeli laws appear neutral, but are applied in discriminatory fashion. For example, laws facilitating government land seizures make no reference to Palestinians, but nonetheless have been used almost exclusively to expropriate their properties for Jewish settlements.Consider what it would be like if:• Our Constitution defined the union as a "white Christian democratic state?"• Our laws still barred marriage across ethnic-religious lines?• Our government appointed a Chief Priest, empowered to define membership criteria for the white Christian nation?• Our government legally enabled immigration by white Christians while barring it for others?• Our government funded a Center for Demography that worked to increase the birth rates of white Christians to ensure their majority status?These examples all have parallels in Israeli practices.While Israel's Palestinian citizens have rights to vote, run for office, form political parties and to speak relatively freely, they remain politically marginalized. No Palestinian party has ever been invited to join a ruling coalition. In recent years, Palestinian politicians and community leaders have been criminally prosecuted or hounded into exile.Nadim Rouhana, social psychologist and director of Mada al-Carmel (a center studying Palestinian citizens of Israel) reports: "Our empirical research reveals that many Palestinian citizens are alienated from the Israeli state. At a deep psychological level, the daily message conveyed in Israeli public discourse is: 'You are not one of us. You don't belong here. You are permanent outsiders.' Imagine: we, whose families have lived here for centuries, hear this even from recently immigrated Jewish Israeli politicians."Palestinian rights are not respected in the Israeli legal system. Israel has no written constitution, only "Basic Laws" that were enacted piecemeal over time. None enshrines equality, and efforts by Palestinian lawmakers in Israel's Knesset to add an explicit guarantee of equal rights have been rebuffed.The 1948 Israeli Declaration of Independence promised equal rights to all citizens in a Jewish state, and has occasionally been cited by the Israeli High Court. But a declaration of independence does not play the same legal role as a constitution or basic law. As students of American history know, the U.S. Declaration of Independence held that "all men are created equal" but failed to provide legal leverage to dismantle slavery, or to empower women to vote. Equal rights were only installed by the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, and women's suffrage only by the 19th Amendment. Lacking the necessary tools, the Israeli High Court has failed to consistently protect equal rights for Palestinian citizens.Shalala's treatment in Israel was, no doubt, demeaning. The incident's effect nonetheless will be constructive if it serves to alert more Americans to Israel's discrimination against its Palestinian citizens — and creates pressure on Israel to adopt equal rights for all. Only then will durable peace prevail in the Middle East.

Thursday, August 12, 2010

Max Blumenthal provides an eyewitness account to this third destruction (within a two week period) of the Beduin village Al-Arakib.If you go to his website, you can see a short video of the event.Another video clip, by the Israel Social TV, can be seen atttp://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=1529600129185

As the article below explains, the village destruction is part of a forced relocation efforts, meant to squeeze as many of the NegevBeduins into a few villages the Israeli government built for that purpose. The aim is to wean any and all Beduins of their semi-nomadic ways. This can be seen as an effort to destroy their culture and way of life. The village existence offered them does not include job prospects - just a place to while their lives in poverty and despair.As someone who lives in Arizona, the similarity to the forced relocation of the Navajo is inescapable.

"The Negev affords me the pleasure of watching a wasteland develop into the most fruitful portion of Israel by a totally Jewish act of creation." –David Ben Gurion, Memoirs

In the middle of the night on August 10, residents of the unrecognized Bedouin village of al-Arakib sent a panicked text message to Israeli activists in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Israeli police helicopters were buzzing overhead, surveying the scene ahead of what was likely to be a new round of demolitions. Three activists staying in the village had been nabbed during a night raid. Having already witnessed the razing of their homes twice in the past two weeks, the residents of Al-Arakib expected the third round of demolitions to arrive tonight, on the eve of Ramadan. During Ramadan, when the villagers fasted all day, the police and Israeli Land Adminstration reasoned they would be too weakened to rebuild — it was prime time for destruction.

I arrived in Al-Arakib at 3 AM with a handful of Jerusalem-based activists. A local couple hauled out mattresses and blankets and poured us small cups of coffee. "I've had enough of sleeping," the man grumbled as he reclined next to his wife. He seemed grateful to have company. I laid down and stared at the desert sky, listening to the man describe in a lulled tone the experience of watching his neighbors' homes crumple under the teeth of bulldozers again and again. As he trailed off, I heard a low droning sound in the distance. Were they here already? I looked around at the others. No one to register the slightest sign of concern. Finally, I slipped into a light slumber.

Two hours later I was torn from my sleep. "They're here!" someone shouted in Hebrew. I leapt from my mattress and scrambled up a dune until I reached the center of the village. A phalanx of one hundred riot cops were already there, bristling with assault weapons and centurion shields. Flanked by bulldozers, they quickly ringed the activists and journalists, who numbered about two dozen, and began forcibly pushing them away from the site of the demolitions. Their intention seemed to be to prevent any brave souls from standing between the bulldozers and the homes they sought to destroy. Dispatched by a faceless network of clerks and engineers in air-conditioned offices to do the dirty work of the state, the police performed their duty with cold efficiency.

As the bulldozers trundled around the village, tearing tarps from plywood pylons, crushing tin roofs, and dragging the shattered structures into hulking piles, the villagers watched with resignation. Seated on her bed in the naked desert, a girl wiped a few tears from her eyes, grimacing at the sight before her. On a nearby hill, a man quizzed his daughter on surahs from the Quran before sending her to collect mattresses from beneath the dusty waste of what used to be their sleeping quarters. An old woman stood impassively by a flock of birds perched on the collapsed remains of her house. Dispossession and homelessness have become nearly mundane in Al-Arakib.

The villagers remain devoted to the nomadic Bedouin tradition. (Why else would they resist with such tenacity the Israeli government's plan to resettle them in one of the Indian reservation-style "development communities" the state has created for them?) However, they have established a permanent presence in the areas around their village that pre-dates the foundation of Israel. Al-Arakib's cemetery, for example, contains the graves dating back to the end of the 19th century. Yet the Bedouins' historical claim to the Negev has not convinced the state that they deserve legal recognition. Nor have their attempts to demonstrate their loyalty by serving as front-line combat soldiers in the Israeli Army. In the eyes of the state, the Arabs of the Negev are at best quasi-human.

In 1953, the first Prime Minister of Israel David Ben Gurion (original name: David Gryn) moved to Sde Boker, a kibbutz in the Negev. A self-described messianist who rejected the existence of God while simultaneously describing the Torah as his political guidebook, Ben Gurion saw the Negev as a blank slate for realizing his revolutionary fever dreams. In his memoirs, he fantasized about evacuating Tel Aviv and settling five million Jews in small settlements throughout the Negev. Just as he disdained the cosmopolitan spirit of Tel Aviv's urbanists, Ben Gurion was disgusted by the sight of the open desert, describing it as "a criminal waste." In the place of sand dunes, he imagined a Jewish replica of Northern Europe.

"When I look out of my window and see a tree standing [in the Negev]," Ben Gurion wrote, "that tree gives me a greater sense of beauty and personal delight than all the vast forests I have seen in Switzerland or Scandinavia… Not only because I helped to grow them but because they constitute a gift of man to Nature, and a gift of the Jews to the cradle of their culture."

Influenced by the ethnocentric Ashkenazi outlook of Labor Zionism, Ben Gurion wrote with deep contempt for non-European cultures. He denigrated the Jews who had immigrated to Israel from Arab countries as "savage" and as "a primitive community" that reveres pimps and thieves. But he at least acknowledged their existence in Israeli life. In his writings about the Negev, Ben Gurion did not once mention the presence of the tens of thousands of Arab Beduoins whose villages abutted his kibbutz. To him, their culture was void; they lived in a "wasteland." They were obstacles to his utopian vision, not human beings.

Today the Israeli government remains committed to fulfilling Ben Gurion's fantasies even though the Israeli public has completely turned its back on the Negev. "It seems that the fantasies grow stronger especially when the Jews do not move to live in the desert," the Israeli blogger Eyal Niv wrote. "The more the Jews back away from the desert, the more their leaders toughen the force, frequency, and cruelty of the expulsion of its other residents."

In the areas in and around Al-Arakib, just 5 km north of the city of Beersheva, the Jewish National Fund is in the process of planting the "Ambassador Forest." The forest will cover the land inhabited for over 100 years by the residents of Al-Arakib and prevent them from ever returning. The "Blueprint Negev" plan of the Jewish National Fund, an organization that claims to be acting "on behalf of Jewish people everywhere," can only be realized through harsh military force, the razing of villages, and ultimately, ethnic cleansing. The meting out of these practices against citizens of Israel should raise serious questions about the country's claim to uphold democratic values.

After the Israeli Police completed their third demolition of Al-Arakib, the villagers collected the remains of their homes and, with the assistance of a few international and Jewish Israeli activists, began rebuilding again. Without any recourse from the state or its courts, they have no other option but to start over from scratch. And they have nowhere else to go."The Negev affords me the pleasure of watching a wasteland develop into the most fruitful portion of Israel by a totally Jewish act of creation." –David Ben Gurion, Memoirs

In the middle of the night on August 10, residents of the unrecognized Bedouin village of al-Arakib sent a panicked text message to Israeli activists in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Israeli police helicopters were buzzing overhead, surveying the scene ahead of what was likely to be a new round of demolitions. Three activists staying in the village had been nabbed during a night raid. Having already witnessed the razing of their homes twice in the past two weeks, the residents of Al-Arakib expected the third round of demolitions to arrive tonight, on the eve of Ramadan. During Ramadan, when the villagers fasted all day, the police and Israeli Land Adminstration reasoned they would be too weakened to rebuild — it was prime time for destruction.

I arrived in Al-Arakib at 3 AM with a handful of Jerusalem-based activists. A local couple hauled out mattresses and blankets and poured us small cups of coffee. "I've had enough of sleeping," the man grumbled as he reclined next to his wife. He seemed grateful to have company. I laid down and stared at the desert sky, listening to the man describe in a lulled tone the experience of watching his neighbors' homes crumple under the teeth of bulldozers again and again. As he trailed off, I heard a low droning sound in the distance. Were they here already? I looked around at the others. No one to register the slightest sign of concern. Finally, I slipped into a light slumber.

Two hours later I was torn from my sleep. "They're here!" someone shouted in Hebrew. I leapt from my mattress and scrambled up a dune until I reached the center of the village. A phalanx of one hundred riot cops were already there, bristling with assault weapons and centurion shields. Flanked by bulldozers, they quickly ringed the activists and journalists, who numbered about two dozen, and began forcibly pushing them away from the site of the demolitions. Their intention seemed to be to prevent any brave souls from standing between the bulldozers and the homes they sought to destroy. Dispatched by a faceless network of clerks and engineers in air-conditioned offices to do the dirty work of the state, the police performed their duty with cold efficiency.

As the bulldozers trundled around the village, tearing tarps from plywood pylons, crushing tin roofs, and dragging the shattered structures into hulking piles, the villagers watched with resignation. Seated on her bed in the naked desert, a girl wiped a few tears from her eyes, grimacing at the sight before her. On a nearby hill, a man quizzed his daughter on surahs from the Quran before sending her to collect mattresses from beneath the dusty waste of what used to be their sleeping quarters. An old woman stood impassively by a flock of birds perched on the collapsed remains of her house. Dispossession and homelessness have become nearly mundane in Al-Arakib.

The villagers remain devoted to the nomadic Bedouin tradition. (Why else would they resist with such tenacity the Israeli government's plan to resettle them in one of the Indian reservation-style "development communities" the state has created for them?) However, they have established a permanent presence in the areas around their village that pre-dates the foundation of Israel. Al-Arakib's cemetery, for example, contains the graves dating back to the end of the 19th century. Yet the Bedouins' historical claim to the Negev has not convinced the state that they deserve legal recognition. Nor have their attempts to demonstrate their loyalty by serving as front-line combat soldiers in the Israeli Army. In the eyes of the state, the Arabs of the Negev are at best quasi-human.

In 1953, the first Prime Minister of Israel David Ben Gurion (original name: David Gryn) moved to Sde Boker, a kibbutz in the Negev. A self-described messianist who rejected the existence of God while simultaneously describing the Torah as his political guidebook, Ben Gurion saw the Negev as a blank slate for realizing his revolutionary fever dreams. In his memoirs, he fantasized about evacuating Tel Aviv and settling five million Jews in small settlements throughout the Negev. Just as he disdained the cosmopolitan spirit of Tel Aviv's urbanists, Ben Gurion was disgusted by the sight of the open desert, describing it as "a criminal waste." In the place of sand dunes, he imagined a Jewish replica of Northern Europe.

"When I look out of my window and see a tree standing [in the Negev]," Ben Gurion wrote, "that tree gives me a greater sense of beauty and personal delight than all the vast forests I have seen in Switzerland or Scandinavia… Not only because I helped to grow them but because they constitute a gift of man to Nature, and a gift of the Jews to the cradle of their culture."

Influenced by the ethnocentric Ashkenazi outlook of Labor Zionism, Ben Gurion wrote with deep contempt for non-European cultures. He denigrated the Jews who had immigrated to Israel from Arab countries as "savage" and as "a primitive community" that reveres pimps and thieves. But he at least acknowledged their existence in Israeli life. In his writings about the Negev, Ben Gurion did not once mention the presence of the tens of thousands of Arab Beduoins whose villages abutted his kibbutz. To him, their culture was void; they lived in a "wasteland." They were obstacles to his utopian vision, not human beings.

Today the Israeli government remains committed to fulfilling Ben Gurion's fantasies even though the Israeli public has completely turned its back on the Negev. "It seems that the fantasies grow stronger especially when the Jews do not move to live in the desert," the Israeli blogger Eyal Niv wrote. "The more the Jews back away from the desert, the more their leaders toughen the force, frequency, and cruelty of the expulsion of its other residents."

In the areas in and around Al-Arakib, just 5 km north of the city of Beersheva, the Jewish National Fund is in the process of planting the "Ambassador Forest." The forest will cover the land inhabited for over 100 years by the residents of Al-Arakib and prevent them from ever returning. The "Blueprint Negev" plan of the Jewish National Fund, an organization that claims to be acting "on behalf of Jewish people everywhere," can only be realized through harsh military force, the razing of villages, and ultimately, ethnic cleansing. The meting out of these practices against citizens of Israel should raise serious questions about the country's claim to uphold democratic values.

After the Israeli Police completed their third demolition of Al-Arakib, the villagers collected the remains of their homes and, with the assistance of a few international and Jewish Israeli activists, began rebuilding again. Without any recourse from the state or its courts, they have no other option but to start over from scratch. And they have nowhere else to go.

Saturday, August 7, 2010

Persistent Israeli- and US-led rejection of a two-state solution in Israel/Palestine has led to the emergence—on the left and among Palestinian activists—of serious proposals for a single state for everyone west of the Jordan River. One of the most detailed outlines is contained in Ali Abunimah's book One Country: A Bold Proposal. The idea has been permitted an airing in the mainstream press (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2003/oct/23/israel-the-alternative/), although only to be rejected. And it has also been subject to harsh critique from the left as well. Noam Chomsky, for instance, has forcefully rejected advocacy for a single state (http://counterpunch.org/barat06062008.html and commentary at http://jewishpeacenews.blogspot.com/2008/06/chomsky-and-pappe-on-future-of-israel.html), although he insists that it is important to distinguish carefully between a single democratic state of all its citizens and a bi-national state. Chomsky claims a bi-national state (inwhich national entities with a high degree of autonomy are joined together into a single state, like Catalonia in Spain) is a reasonable ultimate goal for the region. But it's not possible, he argues, to advocate for this because the only way to get there is via two states that might in the future enter into closer relations. By contrast, a single state of all its citizens has almost no prospect of coming about, not least because (as Uri Avnery points out) Jews would likely soon be a numerical minority in such a state and so it would be tantamount to the abandonment of Zionism.

Now, as Noam Sheizaf reports in Ha'aretz (first article below), proposals for a single state are emerging from the right too. And not from marginal figures, but from the likes of Moshe Arens, a former defense and foreign affairs minister, Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin, Likud MK Tzipi Hotovely, Uri Elitzur, former chairman of the Yesha Council of Settlements and Hanan Porat, one of the founders of Gush Emunim. The proposals merit very serious attention, especially from those on the left who are tempted by some sort of one state solution. The fact that it is being taken seriously on the right both makes it much more likely that a single state would be implemented and show what the likely contours of acceptability such a state would have for the Israeli establishment.

The second and third articles below give respectively positive (Ali Abunimah) and skeptical (Uri Avnery) responses to the proposals. Advocates for a single state (like Abunimah, second article below) find grounds for hope in the rightist proposals. Abunimah gives two reasons, both based on an analogy with South Africa. First, South African whites under Apartheid, while often supporting limited 'reforms', never explicitly supported anything as radical as the Mandela settlement. The same could be true in Israel: the offensive features of the rightist one-state solution (for instance, the complete omission of Gaza from consideration) might be eliminated under international pressure and a far more equitable state might emerge. Second, peace is not made by those at the center of the spectrum, but by the radicals on each side. In South Africa it was the National Party (the architect of Apartheid) that had to negotiate with Mandela's ANC (not liberals with Zulus) to bring Apartheid toan end. And so it may be in Israel: the right, and especially the settler movement, are the ones who can make peace. Abunimah may be right that when the time comes the Israeli right and settler movements will, like the South African National Party, simply acquiesce in granting citizenship to the non-Jewish majority. But that is surely not what the current one state proposals from the right are aiming for.

Avnery (third article below) emphasizes the limitations of the proposals: Gaza, for instance, is in every case excluded from consideration. What would happen to the people living there is not clear. All the proposals enjoin the immediate annexation of the West Bank so that settlement expansion can continue without the existing (minor) hindrances from the US and international opinion. By contrast, Palestinian citizenship would not be on offer for at least a decade, perhaps a generation or only in the 'far future'. And this (in different ways in different plans) would be conditional on what many of the proposals describe as 'integration' of the Palestinian population into the Israeli state. It's not clear what this means, perhaps loyalty oaths and the like. Nor is it clear what would happen to those who did not 'integrate'. They might be expelled or granted only limited citizenship rights or perhaps no rights at all. In other words, the settlers would get what they wantnow and all possibility of a Palestinian national entity would be destroyed; Palestinians would get nothing but an indefinitely postponed promise of rights sometime in the future if they behave properly. But it is the demographic issue—something not mentioned by any of the proposals—that ought to give most serious pause. It is hardly likely, Avnery argues, that the Israeli right has suddenly become willing to abandon—or even seriously risk—the Zionist project. The likely numerical superiority in the near future of Palestinians in Israel/Palestine (to say nothing of the Palestinian refugees living elsewhere) therefore makes it a structural impossibility that Palestinians will ever be granted full citizenship rights. Which would mean as former JPN editor and founder member of JVP, Mitchell Plitnick points out http://mitchellplitnick.com/2010/07/20/the-one-state-solution-comes-from-the-right/), if the two state solution is now an impossibility, then there is no just solution atall.

It's an idea for solving the conflict that sounds like a vision of the end of days: Grant Israeli citizenship and equal rights to all the Palestinians in the West Bank. And who is proposing the one-state solution? Right-wingers and settlers

By Noam Sheizaf

"The prospects of the negotiations with Mahmoud Abbas do not look promising. President Obama undoubtedly thinks otherwise, but if Abbas speaks for anyone, it's barely half the Palestinians. The chances of anything good coming of this are not great. Another possibility is Jordan. If Jordan were ready to absorb both more territories and more people, things would be much easier and more natural. But Jordan does not agree to this. Therefore, I say that we can look at another option: for Israel to apply its law to Judea and Samaria and grant citizenship to 1.5 million Palestinians."

These remarks, which to many sound subversive, were not voiced by a left-wing advocate of a binational state. The speaker is from the Betar movement, a former top leader in Likud and political patron of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a former defense and foreign affairs minister - Moshe Arens. On June 2, Arens published an op-ed in Haaretz ("Is there another option?" ) in which he urged consideration of a political alternative to the existing situation and the political negotiations. He wants to break the great taboo of Israeli policy making by granting Israeli citizenship to the Palestinians in the West Bank. Arens is not put off by those who accuse him of promoting the idea of a binational Jewish-Palestinian state. "We are already a binational state," he says, "and also a multicultural and multi-sector state. The minorities [meaning Arabs] here make up 20 percent of the population - that's a fact and you can't argue with facts."

As Washington, Ramallah and Jerusalem slouch toward what seems like a well-known, self-evident solution - two states for two nations, on the basis of the 1967 borders and a small-scale territorial swap - a conceptual breakthrough is taking place in the right wing. Its ideologues are no longer content with rejecting withdrawal and evacuation of settlements, citing security arguments calculated to strike fear into the hearts of the Israeli mainstream. Their new idea addresses the shortcomings of the status quo, takes account of the isolation in which Israel finds itself and acknowledges the need to break the political deadlock.

Once the sole preserve of the political margins, the approach is now being advocated by leading figures in Likud and among the settlers - people who are not necessarily considered extremists or oddballs. About a month before Arens published his article, Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin (Likud ) said, "It's preferable for the Palestinians to become citizens of the state than for us to divide the country." In an interview this week (see box ), Rivlin reiterates and elaborates this viewpoint. In May 2009, Likud MK Tzipi Hotovely organized a conference in the Knesset titled "Alternatives to Two States." Since then, on a couple of occasions, she has called publicly for citizenship to be granted to the Palestinians "in gradual fashion." Now she is planning to publish a position paper on the subject. Uri Elitzur, former chairman of the Yesha Council of Settlements and Netanyahu's bureau chief in his first term as prime minister, last year published an article in the settlers' journal Nekudacalling for the onset of a process, at the conclusion of which the Palestinians will have "a blue ID card [like Israelis], yellow license plates [like Israelis], National Insurance and the right to vote for the Knesset." Emily Amrousi, a former spokesperson for the Yesha Council, takes part in meetings between settlers and Palestinians and speaks explicitly of "one land in which the children of settlers and the children of Palestinians will be bused to school together."

It's still not a full-fledged political camp and there are still holes in the theory. But although its advocates do not seem to be working together, the plans they put forward are remarkably similar. They all reject totally the various ideas of ethnic separation and recognize that political rights accrue to the Palestinians. They talk about a process that will take between a decade and a generation to complete, at the end of which the Palestinians will enjoy full personal rights, but in a country whose symbols and spirit will remain Jewish. It is at this point that the one-state right wing diverges from the binational left. The right is not talking about a neutral "state of all its citizens" with no identity, nor about "Israstine" with a flag showing a crescent and a Shield of David. As envisaged by the right wing, one state still means a sovereign Jewish state, but in a more complex reality, and inspired by the vision of a democratic Jewish state without an occupation and withoutapartheid, without fences and separations. In such a state, Jews will be able to live in Hebron and pray at the Tomb of the Patriarchs, and a Palestinian from Ramallah will be able to serve as an ambassador and live in Tel Aviv or simply enjoy ice cream on the city's seashore. Sounds off the wall? "If every path seems to reach an impasse,' Elitzur wrote in Nekuda, "usually the right path is one that was never even considered, the one that is universally acknowledged to be unacceptable, taboo."

Dead end

A year ago, in a seminar sponsored by the Geneva Initiative group, Uri Elitzur astonished an audience of parliamentary assistants with pointed, clear remarks about the desirable political framework. "The worst solution," he said, "is apparently the right one: a binational state, full annexation, full citizenship."

Among those who were not surprised were leading figures from the settlers' movement Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful ). Elitzur has been trying to sell them his idea for some time. "At first I was in splendid isolation," he says, "but lately more and more people are willing to move in my direction. I think it's the only practicable solution. The two-state formula has been kicked around for 10 years or more. All the politicians say - aloud or in a whisper - they are for it, but it's still not happening. The differences between left and right, over which they kill each other in hatred, are really very small. But everyone is convinced that moving a fraction of an inch from his viewpoint will mean the country's destruction. Neither the one side nor the other is to blame, nor even the Palestinians. The Arab world simply does not want to reach a compromise with us, and even if the formula is found, it won't endure.

"The existing situation is also a dead end," Elitzur continues. "It can't last forever. The problems Israel has faced in the international community in the past five years are due to the fact that the world is fed up. The international community is telling us, 'You claimed it was a temporary situation, yet that temporary situation has already lasted 40 years. We are ready to agree to another decade, but we want to know where things are going.' The Israelis are also starting to grasp this. I want us to look for the solutions on the other side of the scale, which lies between the existing situation and the annexation and naturalization of all the Palestinians."

In internal forums and in front of a home audience, Elitzur is even more outspoken. "There are many softened or newspeak variations of apartheid," he wrote in Nekuda, which devoted an entire issue to the search for an alternative policy to the two-state solution. "Some suggest that the Palestinians should be under Israeli rule but vote in the elections for the Jordanian parliament. There are ideas involving autonomy, cantons, powerless self-government. It's not by chance or by neglect that none of these proposals became the official policy of Likud or of the right. In the end, they all go back to a dead end: a whole population living under Israeli rule without civil rights. That is unacceptable on a permanent basis. It's a situation that can exist only temporarily and faces mounting pressure, both internal and external, to bring the temporary situation to an end at long last."

What do you say to the allegations that you have joined the radical left?

"There's a clear separation between us. I am talking about a Jewish state, the state of the Jewish people, which will contain a large Arab minority. The left is talking about an Arab state containing a Jewish minority, even if they do not explicitly think that. The leftist demonstrators in [the West Bank village of] Bil'in have totally joined the Palestinian cause."

Still, in terms of the political plan, there are points of convergence between you and them.

"In terms of the political plan, yes. But so what? I have many points in common with the extreme left. I am in favor of refusing an order to dismantle settlements, they are in favor of refusing an order to serve in the territories, and both of us are against the [separation] fence. I am not frightened at the fact that there are Jews with whom I profoundly disagree on one issue but with whom I share views on other issues. But I will not enter into a political alliance with the Anarchists [Against the Wall] even though I too am against the fence. We have common ground, but beyond it we have a very deep disagreement. As I see it, the State of Israel was established in order to preserve the rights of the small Jewish minority in the Middle East - six million vs. 300 million - and that is its main purpose. After fulfilling its main purpose, it is also a democratic state. That's why it has to grant human rights to everyone, Jew or non-Jew."

Indeed, Elitzur no longer needs the left to wrench him out of his splendid isolation. Hanan Porat, for example, one of the iconic founders of Gush Emunim, though rejecting what he terms "the automatic citizenship that Uri is proposing, which is naive and is liable to lead to grave consequences," also suggests gradually applying Israeli law in the territories, first in regions where there is a Jewish majority, and within a decade or a generation, throughout.

And the Palestinians?

Porat: "In my view, every Arab has three options. First, those who want an Arab state and are ready to implement that goal by means of terrorism and a struggle against the state, have no place in the Land of Israel. Second, those who accept their place and accept Jewish sovereignty, but do not want to take part in the state and fulfill all their obligations, can be considered residents and enjoy full human rights, but not political representation in the state's institutions. By the same token, they will also not have full obligations, such as military or national service. Third, those who say they are loyal to the state and to its laws and are ready to fulfill the obligations it prescribes and declare loyalty to it, can receive full citizenship. I consider this a moral and human principle: citizenship is not forced on anyone or granted just like that. We tried this in East Jerusalem, and the fact is that we failed.

"There is no point in threatening us with the idea of a state of all its citizens," Porat continues. "Already 30 years ago, we in Gush Emunim were against solutions of fear - both withdrawal and transfer - and said that in the Return to Zion there is room for the Arab population who desire this, as long as we are not naive about the process."

Lower price

A few weeks before he published his article in Nekuda, Elitzur spoke at the conference Hotovely organized in the Knesset on alternatives to the two-state solution. Despite the participation of serious speakers, such as former chief of staff and present minister for strategic affairs, Moshe Ya'alon, and Major General (res. ) Giora Eiland, a former head of the National Security Council, Hotovely came out of the conference disappointed. "It made a lot of headlines and had resonance, but I did not see a genuine vision," she says. "The ideas ranged from the status quo to 'Jordan is Palestine.' Most of the speakers rejected the alternative put forward by the left without putting anything positive on the table.

"This approach has characterized the political discourse of the right wing for years," she continues. "The right, you could say, had a Qassam for every argument of the left. We had deep ideological roots which said that this is our land, but beyond that we did not put forward a real solution. Only Uri Elitzur took a different approach."

Since then, Hotovely has become increasingly convinced that the idea of giving the Palestinians in Judea and Samaria citizenship must be part of the political horizon. At the moment, she envisages this as a long-term process, perhaps lasting a generation, during which the situation on the ground will stabilize, while the symbols and character of the Jewish state will be enshrined in a constitution. But the goal must be clear: annexation and citizenship, or as she puts it, "removing the question mark from above Judea and Samaria."

Hotovely: "My outlook has two motivations. First, my deep belief in our right to the Land of Israel. Shiloh and Beit El settlements are, for me, the land of our forefathers in the full sense of the term. The second thing is that I do not ignore the fact that there are Palestinians here. Both the left and the right chose to shut their eyes to the fact that there are human beings here. The left chose to do it by building a fence and deciding that they just don't want to see them, and the right simply said, 'We will continue and see what happens.' We have reached a critical point, a situation in which the entire Zionist enterprise is under threat, because the international community now disputes the legitimacy of our defense of Sderot and Ashkelon, not the legitimacy of building a settler outpost."

The international community takes that stance because we are still occupiers. There will be greater legitimacy when the occupation ends.

"We did not get legitimacy in return for our previous withdrawals. Worse, the harm we are inflicting on the Palestinian population has become far more mortal. Our instruments of defense became tanks and planes, and that is always worse than policing operations that are done when you control the ground.

"The assumption of the left is that once it hides behind the international border, everything will be permitted. But it's clear already now that not everything is permitted and that the principle of proportionality is shackling Israel in Gaza - so what will happen in Judea and Samaria? In fact, it goes even deeper. There is a moral failure here. After all, the left has long since stopped talking about peace and is resorting to a terminology of separation and segregation. They are also convinced that the confrontation will continue even afterward. The result is a solution that perpetuates the conflict and turns us from occupiers into perpetrators of massacres, to put it bluntly. It's the left that made us a crueler nation and also put our security at risk."

Could a country with such a large non-Jewish minority still be Jewish?

"At the moment, we are talking about citizenship in Judea and Samaria, not Gaza. In Gaza there is an enemy regime that rejects Israel. It is outside the political discourse, including the two-state discourse. There are 1.5 million Palestinians in Judea and Samaria. I want it to be clear that I do not recognize national rights of Palestinians in the Land of Israel. I recognize their human rights and their individual rights, and also their individual political rights - but between the sea and the Jordan there is room for one state, a Jewish state."

The fact is that the state is having a hard time containing a minority of 20 percent even now. How will it cope with 30 or 40 percent and also preserve its character?

"Every choice entails a price. The status quo carries a heavy price, the two-state idea carries a heavy price, and the approach I am now presenting also carries a price. Coping with the Arab minority is a lower price than the danger of the Qassams, the delegitimization and the immoral actions we will commit in coping with them, and also preferable to giving up parts of the homeland, including Jerusalem."

Once the Palestinians become citizens, things might lurch out of your control. Some will say you are playing with fire.

"Everyone is playing with fire. There is no solution that is divorced from the world of risk in the Middle East. The risks in the two-state conception are not virtual, they have already been actualized. The risks I am talking about can be addressed in a rational process lasting a generation."

Of the two dangers you discern - a binational state or a Palestinian state - which would you choose?

"Unequivocally the binational danger. In the binational process we have a degree of control, but the moment you abandon the area to the Palestinian entity, what control do you have over what will happen there?"

51 percent majority

In a political reality of increasing polarization between the country's Jewish and Arab citizens, talk of a shared space between the Mediterranean and the Jordan does not always get a serious hearing. Some of the right-wing spokesmen understand this. For Moshe Arens, integration of the Arab population into Israeli society is a prior condition - only afterward will it be possible to talk about granting citizenship to the Palestinians in the territories. "If we are incapable of integrating Israel's Arab citizens, how will we be able to offer the others citizens?" Arens says. "If I wanted something to happen after my article was published, it was for an emphasis to be placed on the attitude toward the Arab population inside Israel. I have spoken to the prime minister about this dozens of times. It's the biggest problem in the country. If we do not integrate the Arabs, it will simply be a disaster."

There is one large party that says they simply have to be transferred into a Palestinian state.

"The platform of Yisrael Beiteinu is nonsensical, an attempt to curry to the lowest common denominator in the country," says Arens sharply. "Where will the transfer be carried out? Will Galilee be transferred to the Palestinian state? The Negev to Egypt? It's not doable. They are just causing damage to 20 percent of our population, insulting them by saying they want to be rid of them, strip them of Israeli citizenship. Who ever heard the like?

"I repeat: first of all, we need to take care of the Israeli Arabs who are citizens. That is also essential if we are thinking of giving citizenship to Palestinians from Judea and Samaria. Only if they see that the Arabs have it good in Israel will they think it might be good for them, too."

Your opponents will say that by publishing an article like this, you are strengthening Sheikh Ra'ad Salah [a leader of the Islamic Movement in Israel] and that you will introduce a fifth column into the country that will spell the end of the Jewish state.

"Only those who don't grasp the full depth of the issue will say that. I have written dozens of times that the policy must be two-pronged: against the Islamic Movement - to outlaw them, because they are a subversive, seditious movement - and, at the same time, to work against feelings of discrimination among Israel's Arab citizens. It is untenable for these people to be hewers of wood and drawers of water - doing the dirty work in the industrialized and advanced country that is Israel."

Have you been accused of becoming a post-Zionist in the wake of your article?

"That's a lot of nonsense. Was [Revisionist leader Ze'ev] Jabotinsky a post-Zionist? He talked about a Jewish state with a Jewish majority, but for him a majority meant even 51 percent, too. In his last book, he suggested that the president might be a Jew and the vice president an Arab, and also the opposite. Jabotinsky was no post-Zionist."

If there is anything that unites the political establishment - Ehud Barak, Tzipi Livni and now Netanyahu, too - it's the view that granting the Palestinians citizenship is dangerous and that only separation will ensure a democratic Jewish state.

"Demagoguery. If Zionism means 'as little as possible for the Arabs,' I have to say that I do not accept that. Jabotinsky did not accept it, either. You call that Zionism - as few Arabs as possible in Israel? That is the Zionism of [Avigdor] Lieberman. If what is implied by the rhetoric of Tzipi Livni is that we need as few Arabs as possible in Israel, it's not so far from Lieberman. "People should not exploit what I said for their purposes. My intention is that, to begin with, we have to focus on the Arab population in Israel, and especially the Muslims. It's definitely a dual-stage process. Only then, many years from now, will it be possible to consider additional minorities, and then maybe the Arabs across the Green Line will say that things are simply good in Israel - not in order to overcome us demographically, but simply because things here are good. We haven't yet reached that point."

One land

If Elitzur, Hotovely and Arens represent the political aspect of the idea of a joint state, Emily Amrousi is interested in its everyday side. Amrousi, who lives in the West Bank settlement of Talmon, is active in Eretz Shalom (Land of Peace ), an organization that arranges meetings between settlers and Palestinians, focusing on the local interests of both sides, not necessarily on the political pitfalls. She, too, admits that in the distant future there will have to be citizenship for everyone. "But don't make me out to be a one-state advocate," Amrousi says. "In the end, it might arrive at that, but that's still a very long way off. Let's talk first about one land, one strip of ground. We are not like the Canaanite movement: we are not forgoing the State of Israel and the flag of Israel."

And until we reach the coveted equality, will we have to make do with the status quo?

"No, I don't like the status quo either because it's really not moral. It's impossible to go on like this, with a situation in which my Palestinian neighbors have to cross three checkpoints to get from one village to another. There is a distortion here - true, for security reasons, for logical reasons - but something went wrong along the way, and we can't go on accepting this.

"The word 'citizenship' is very national and very political. In the Eretz Shalom initiative we do not talk about citizenship, but about concepts of neighborly relations. There are no neighborly relations here, because either it's relations between enemies or we are transparent to them and they to us. And the relations that do exist are like those between horse and rider. There must be an initial basis before we talk about citizenship and a judicial system. We need to speak their language and we can even have a joint swimming pool here, because both they and we need separation between men and women. That may be a bit far off, but we have to think first about everyday life. I know that sounds like conditional citizenship - saying they must first be my good neighbors and then I will grant them rights - but I really do want to talk about a process that starts from below."

From below or from above, in the end we reach a state whose demographic and geographic parameters are very different from what we have today.

"Demography is definitely a threat, but the other threat is bigger. The harder price is to cut up this country, with one part topographically higher than the other. I can't speak with the Israeli public now about citizenship and Palestinians on the beach in Tel Aviv, because that's a threat to the public. The whole situation now is wrong. We made a mistake, we arrived at the wrong place and we have a long way to go, but in the end there has to be one space here. We will yet talk about one state, but in the meantime we can talk about one land."

One can take a cynical view of Eretz Shalom, of Amrousi's decision to learn Arabic or of the project being organized by the settlers in Talmon: to build a lean-to for Palestinian workers awaiting a security check before entering their settlement. Fashionably late, one could say, and under the threat of evacuation, Gush Emunim is discovering the enlightened occupation. But there is another side, too: the impression that the Israeli center, in its addiction to the separation idea, has sloughed off the question of relations with the Arab population, on both sides of the Green Line. Is it a coincidence that Amrousi chose to describe the reality in the Land of Israel as "one space," a term used by critical sociologists from the radical left?

Prof. Yehouda Shenhav, formerly from the Sephardi Democratic Rainbow and editor of the journal Theory and Criticism for the past decade, believes that the concept of reality for people on the right, as quoted above, is far more accurate and honest than the two-state concept of the left. In his recent book, "The Time of the Green Line" (Am Oved, Hebrew ), Shenhav returns to what he terms the true foundation of the conflict, namely 1948, and not "the obliterating and blurring paradigm according to which everything was swell until 1967, and then things went awry, as David Grossman writes in 'The Yellow Wind.'" Shenhav rejects both the two-state idea and the "state of all its citizens." He argues that the only possible stable model is one that will recognize the distinctiveness of different communities - among both Palestinians and Jews - in the one space between the sea and the Jordan River.

"The diagnosis of the right-wingers is accurate," Shenhav says, and immediately adds, "But let's be precise: it's not the whole of the right. Most of them do not speak in those terms. But there is a minority that reads reality in a far less denying and less repressive way than all the people on the left who support the two-state solution. The majority of the left does not understand a spatial concept that does not permit homogeneity. The Jews and the Palestinians are Siamese twins. The ideology of the Jewish state espoused by the articulate spokespersons of the left tries to sever the different Palestinian groups, and takes their severance as a fait accompli. In contrast, Rubi [Reuven] Rivlin and Moshe Arens understand that those on both sides of the Green Line are Palestinians.

"I am not in favor of the wrongs being caused by the settlements," Shenhav continues, "but in their political diagnosis the settlers are right. In one way or another, we too will ultimately learn this, and the only question is how much bloodshed it will entail. I wrote exactly what the right is saying today: the war in Gaza is the model that will be repeated in the future if there is separation."

The 1967 lines are accepted by the international community. The left is against the plunder of land that is taking place to the east, against the fact that a settlement like Ofra is situated on private Palestinian land.

"What exactly is the difference between Ofra and Beit Dagan, which is situated on [the former Palestinian village of] Beit Dajan? Do the 19 years from 1948 to 1967 make one settlement moral and the other immoral? In my book I quote Uri Elitzur, who says, 'You [the left] expelled the Palestinians in 1948, did not allow them back, established settlements on all their villages and afterward built the separation fence, and then you come to us with complaints, even though we have not destroyed even one village in the West Bank - not even one - to build a settlement.'

"The 1967 paradigm is intended to make it possible for the left to live in Tel Aviv and feel good about itself," Shenhav continues. "The settlements will be sacrificed in order to atone for what they did to the Palestinians in 1948. The settlers will pay the price of the sins of the left. Yossi Beilin and his Geneva Initiative and all the rest want to preserve the achievements of the Ashkenazi elite.

"Don't get me wrong: I am not in favor of the vision of the right wing. All I am doing is recommending that the left listen to what the right is saying. To take the right wing's diagnosis and develop it into normative and moral left-wing viewpoints, to create a horizon that reflects leftism - not nationalism, not a Jewish empire."

Are you now a person of the left or the right?

"I don't know. I wrote in favor of the [Palestinians'] right of return and I am against the evacuation of settlements. So where does that leave me?"

Great candor

The supporters of the two-state concept always warned against closing a window of opportunity to establish a Palestinian state. Now that the right has started to talk about a one-state solution, is the window closed? Definitely not, says Gadi Baltiansky, director general of the Geneva Initiative: "But I appreciate the sincerity of those who speak clearly at this time. The right always spoke in negative terms. Tzipi Livni once noted that the Likud's platform always starts with the word 'no.' No to a Palestinian state, no to withdrawal, no, no and more no. Now there are people on the right who are saying with great candor what must be done, even if some of them are still hesitant about going public.

"I never liked the division into the 'peace camp' and the 'national camp,'" Baltiansky continues. "The fact is that I am no less national than the right and they want peace no less than I do. In Israel there is a two-state camp and a one-state, binational camp, and the choice is between them. But the right should not delude itself: one Jewish state will not be a solution, but a continuation of the conflict. There will be fights over the flag and over the anthem and over the school curriculum, and the situation will be untenable."

As of now, giving citizenship to the Palestinians is not on the political agenda of the right. According to the head of the Yesha Council, Danny Dayan, "the idea is unrealistic. In the present circumstances, it could put Israel's character at risk. Morally, the fact that the Palestinians will not have full political rights in the foreseeable future is the fault of the Palestinians themselves. They rejected every compromise and chose war and are now paying the price of their mistakes. It's not apartheid, it's their choice."

So what's the solution?

"The solution for the coming decades is the present status quo, with improvements of one kind or another. Of all the possibilities, that one affords the most stable balance. It is also important to say that even so, the Palestinians have more political rights than any Arab citizen in the Middle East, with the possible exception of the Lebanese."

Faithful to his outlook, Dayan last week - ahead of Netanyahu's meeting with U.S. President Barack Obama - was busy cobbling together a coalition of the leaders of the right-wing parties in the Knesset. The aim: to compel Netanyahu to end the construction freeze in the territories at the end of September, as promised. Other MKs who are against the two-state solution, such as Aryeh Eldad (National Union ) and Danny Danon (Likud ), also told me that giving the Palestinians citizenship is not on their agenda, not even in the face of the emerging two-state plan.

Still, the impression is that even those who are against the idea have modified their approach recently. Adi Mintz, a former director general of the Yesha Council, presented a plan whereby after the security situation stabilizes, Israel will annex 60 percent of Judea and Samaria, whose 300,000 Palestinian inhabitants will be granted Israeli citizenship. The status of the rest of the population and of the area will, in this view, be settled within the framework of a comprehensive regional solution in the more distant future.

The right-leaning newspaper, Makor Rishon, recently devoted an issue to the possibility of leaving settlements under Palestinian sovereignty if the two-state plan is implemented. Logic says that if supporters of such an idea are truly serious, it should not be a problem for them to agree to live in the one state that will extend from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River, whatever its character.

In any event, it will soon become clear whether renewal of the political process will lead to the removal from the agenda of every option except the establishment of a Palestinian state, or whether the opposition to such a state will generate momentum for supporters of the one-state alternative. Those who espouse this idea admit that its main drawback is that no genuine discussion of its merits and shortcomings has ever been held. Thus, key issues, such as the transition period leading up to citizenship, the refugee problem, the status of Gaza and even the bizarre question of how many Palestinians there really are have not been seriously addressed.

For this reason, Hotovely wants to publish a position paper on the issue, perhaps with the aid of an American research institute. "I want people to understand the issues, not to say that [MK Ahmed] Tibi and I are from the same party. The taboo that forbids talk about any option other than the two-state solution is almost anti-democratic. It's like brain-gagging."

-----------------------------Israeli right embracing one-state?

By Ali Abunimah

There has been a strong revival in recent years of support among Palestinians for a one-state solution guaranteeing equal rights to Palestinians and Israeli Jews throughout historic Palestine.

One might expect that any support for a single state among Israeli Jews would come from the far left, and in fact this is where the most prominent Israeli Jewish champions of the idea are found, although in small numbers.

Recently, proposals to grant Israeli citizenship to Palestinians in the West Bank, including the right to vote for the knesset, have emerged from a surprising direction: Right-wing stalwarts such as knesset speaker Reuven Rivlin, and former defence minister Moshe Arens, both from the Likud party of Binyamin Netanyahu, the prime minister.

Even more surprisingly, the idea has been pushed by prominent activists among Israel's West Bank settler movement, who were the subject of a must-read profile by Noam Sheizaf in Haaretz.

Unlikely advocates

Their visions still fall far short of what any Palestinian advocate of a single state would consider to be just: The Israeli proposals insist on maintaining the state's character - at least symbolically - as a "Jewish state," exclude the Gaza Strip, and do not address the rights of Palestinian refugees.

And, settlers on land often violently expropriated from Palestinians would hardly seem like obvious advocates for Palestinian human and political rights.

Although the details vary, and in some cases are anathema to Palestinians, what is more revealing is that this debate is occurring openly and in the least likely circles.

The Likudnik and settler advocates of a one-state solution with citizenship for Palestinians realise that Israel has lost the argument that Jewish sovereignty can be maintained forever at any price. A status quo where millions of Palestinians live without rights, subject to control by escalating Israeli violence is untenable even for them.

At the same time repartition of historic Palestine - what they call Eretz Yisrael - into two states is unacceptable, and has proven unattainable - not least because of the settler movement itself.

Some on the Israeli right now recognise what Israeli geographer Meron Benvenisti has said for years: Historic Palestine is already a "de facto binational state," unpartionable except at a cost neither Israelis nor Palestinians are willing to pay.

'Horse and rider'

The relationship between Palestinians and Israelis is not that of equals however, but that "between horse and rider" as one settler vividly put it in Haaretz.

From the settlers' perspective, repartition would mean an uprooting of at least tens of thousands of the 500,000 settlers now in the West Bank, and it would not even solve the national question.

Would the settlers remaining behind in the West Bank (the vast majority under all current two-state proposals) be under Palestinian sovereignty or would Israel continue to exercise control over a network of settlements criss-crossing the putative Palestinian state?

How could a truly independent Palestinian state exist under such circumstances?

The graver danger is that the West Bank would turn into a dozen Gaza Strips with large Israeli civilian populations wedged between miserable, overcrowded walled Palestinian ghettos.

The patchwork Palestinian state would be free only to administer its own poverty, visited by regular bouts of bloodshed.

Even a full Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank - something that is not remotely on the peace process agenda - would leave Israel with 1.5 million Palestinian citizens inside its borders. This population already faces escalating discrimination, incitement and loyalty tests.

In an angry, ultra-nationalist Israel shrunken by the upheaval of abandoning West Bank settlements, these non-Jewish citizens could suffer much worse, including outright ethnic cleansing.

With no progress toward a two-state solution despite decades of efforts, the only Zionist alternative on offer has been outright expulsion of the Palestinians - a programme long-championed by Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman's Yisrael Beitenu party, which has seen its support increase steadily.

Israel is at the point where it has to look in the mirror and even some cold, hard Likudniks like Arens apparently do not like what they see. Yisrael Beitenu's platform is "nonsensical," Arens told Haaretz and simply not "doable".

If Israel feels it is a pariah now, what would happen after another mass expulsion of Palestinians?

Lessons from South Africa

Given these realities, "The worst solution ... is apparently the right one: a binational state, full annexation, full citizenship" in the words of settler activist and former Netanyahu aide Uri Elitzur.

This awakening can be likened to what happened among South African whites in the 1980s. By that time it had become clear that the white minority government's effort to "solve" the problem of black disenfranchisement by creating nominally independent homelands - bantustans - had failed.

Pressure was mounting from internal resistance and the international campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions. By the mid-1980s, whites overwhelmingly understood that the apartheid status quo was untenable and they began to consider "reform" proposals that fell very far short of the African National Congress' demands for a universal franchise - one-person, one-vote in a non-racial South Africa.

The reforms began with the 1984 introduction of a tricameral parliament with separate chambers for whites, coloureds and Indians (none for blacks), with whites retaining overall control.

Until almost the end of the apartheid system, polls showed the vast majority of whites rejected a universal franchise, but were prepared to concede some form of power-sharing with the black majority as long as whites retained a veto over key decisions.

The important point, as I have argued previously, is that one could not predict the final outcome of the negotiations that eventually brought about a fully democratic South Africa in 1994, based on what the white public and elites said they were prepared to accept.

Once Israeli Jews concede that Palestinians must have equal rights, they will not be able to unilaterally impose any system that maintains undue privilege.

A joint state should accommodate Israeli Jews' legitimate collective interests, but it would have to do so equally for everyone else.

Moral currency devalued

The very appearance of the right-wing one-state solution suggests Israel is feeling the pressure and experiencing a relative loss of power. If its proponents thought Israel could "win" in the long-term there would be no need to find ways to accommodate Palestinian rights.

But Israeli Jews see their moral currency and legitimacy drastically devalued worldwide, while demographically Palestinians are on the verge of becoming a majority once again in historic Palestine.

Of course Israeli Jews still retain an enormous power advantage over Palestinians which, while eroding, is likely to last for some time.

Israel's main advantage is a near monopoly on the means of violence, guaranteed by the US.

But legitimacy and stability cannot be gained by reliance on brute force - this is the lesson that is starting to sink in among some Israelis as the country is increasingly isolated after its attacks on Gaza and the Gaza Freedom Flotilla.

Legitimacy can only come from a just and equitable political settlement.

Perhaps the right-wing proponents of a single state recognise that the best time to negotiate a transition which provides safeguards for Israeli Jews' legitimate collective interests is while they are still relatively strong.

Transforming relationships

That proposals for a single state are coming from the Israeli right should not be so surprising in light of experiences in comparable situations.

In South Africa, it was not the traditional white liberal critics of apartheid who oversaw the system's dismantling, but the National Party which had built apartheid in the first place. In Northern Ireland, it was not "moderate" unionists and nationalists like David Trimble and John Hume who finally made power-sharing under the 1998 Belfast Agreement function, but the long-time rejectionists of Ian Paisley's Democratic Unionist Party, and the nationalist Sinn Fein, whose leaders had close ties the IRA.

The experiences in South Africa and Northern Ireland show that transforming the relationship between settler and native, master and slave, or "horse and rider," to one between equal citizens is a very difficult, uncertain and lengthy process.

There are many setbacks and detours along the way and success is not guaranteed. It requires much more than a new constitution; economic redistribution, restitution and restorative justice are essential and meet significant resistance.

But such a transformation is not, as many of the critics of a one-state solution in Palestine/Israel insist, "impossible." Indeed, hope now resides in the space between what is "very difficult" and what is considered "impossible".

The proposals from the Israeli right-wing, however inadequate and indeed offensive they seem in many respects, add a little bit to that hope. They suggest that even those whom Palestinians understandably consider their most implacable foes can stare into the abyss and decide there has to be a radically different way forward.

We should watch how this debate develops and engage and encourage it carefully. In the end it is not what the solution is called that matters, but whether it fulfills the fundamental and inalienable rights of all Palestinians.

Ali Abunimah is author of One Country, A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse and co-founder of The Electronic Intifada.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.

-----------------------

Avnery

24.07.10

Rosemary's Baby

SINCE I witnessed the rise of the Nazis during my childhood in Germany, my nose always tickles when it smells something fascist, even when the odor is still faint.

When the debate about the "one-state solution" began, my nose tickled.

Have you gone mad, I told my nose, this time you are dead wrong. This is a plan of the Left. It is being put forward by leftists of undoubted credentials, the greatest idealists in Israel and abroad, even certified Marxists.

But my nose insisted. It continued to tickle.

Now it appears that the nose was right, after all.

THIS IS not the first time that a kosher leftist plan leads towards extreme rightist consequences.

That happened, for example, to the ugliest symbol of the occupation: the Separation Wall. It was invented by the Left.

When the "terrorist" attacks multiplied, leftist politicians, headed by Haim Ramon, offered a miracle-solution to the problem: an impassable obstacle between Israel and the occupied territories. They argued that it would stop the attacks without recourse to brutal actions in the West Bank.

The Right opposed the idea vehemently. To them it was a conspiracy to fix the borders of the state and promote the two-state solution, which they saw (and still see) as an existential threat to their designs.

But suddenly the Right changed its tune. They realized that the wall offered a wonderful opportunity to annex large tracts of West Bank land and turn them over to the settlers. And that is what happened: the wall/fence was not put up along the Green Line, but cuts deep into the West Bank. It takes away large areas of land from the Palestinian villages.

Nowadays leftists are demonstrating every week against the wall, the right is sending soldiers to shoot at them, and the two-state solution has been set back.

NOW THE rightists have discovered the one-state solution. My nose is tickling.

One of the first was Moshe Arens, former Minister of Defense. Arens is an extreme rightist, a fanatical Likud member. He started to talk about one state from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River, in which the Palestinians would be granted full rights, including citizenship and the vote.

I rubbed my eyes. Is this the same Arens? What has happened to him? But this apparent mystery has a simple solution.

Arens and his companions are faced with a mathematical problem that seems insoluble: turning the triangle into a circle.

Their aim has three sides: (a) a Jewish state, (b) the whole of Eretz Israel, and (c) democracy. How to combine these three sides into one harmonious circle?

Between the sea and the river there now live about 6.5 million Jews and 3.9 million Palestinians – a proportion of 59% Jews to 41% Palestinians (including the inhabitants of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem and the Arab citizens of Israel.) This number does not include, of course, the millions of Palestinian refugees who are living outside the country.)

Several "experts" have tried to dispute these numbers, but respected statisticians, including Israelis, accept them with tiny changes here and there.

The proportion, alas, is rapidly changing in favor of the Palestinians. The Palestinian population is doubling every 18 years. Even taking into account the natural increase of the Jewish population in Israel and the potential immigration in the foreseeable future, one can predict with almost mathematical precision when the Palestinians will constitute the majority between the Jordan and the sea. It's a matter of years rather than decades.

The inescapable conclusion: one can reconcile between any two of the three aspirations, but not all three at once: (a) a Jewish state in the entire country cannot be democratic, (b) a democratic state in the entire country cannot be Jewish, and (c) a Jewish and democratic state cannot include the entire Eretz Israel.

Simple. Logical. One does not have to be Moshe Arens, an engineer by profession, to see this. Therefore the Right is looking for another logic that would allow the creation of a Jewish and democratic state in the entire country.

LAST WEEK Haaretz published a stunning sensation: prominent personalities of the extreme Right – indeed, some of the most extreme – accept the solution of one-state from the sea to the river. They speak about a state in which the Palestinians will be full citizens.

The rightists quoted in Noam Sheizaf's article do not hide their reasons for adopting this line: they want to obstruct the setting up of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, which would mean the end of the settlement enterprise and the evacuation of scores of settlements and outposts throughout the West Bank. They also want to put an end to the growing international pressure for the two-state solution.

Among some leftists in the world, who advocate the one-state solution, the news was greeted with great joy. They pour scorn on the Israeli peace camp (leftists enjoy nothing more than deriding other leftists) and heap praise on the Israeli Right. What magnanimity! What readiness to break out of the box and adopt their opponents' ideals! Only the Right will make peace!

But if these good people would read the texts, they would discover that it ain't necessarily so. To be precise, it's the very opposite.

ALL OF the six rightists quoted in the article are united on a number of points which deserve consideration.

First: all of them exclude the Gaza Strip from the proposed solution. Gaza will no longer be a part of the country. Thus, the number of Palestinians will be reduced by 1.5 million, improving the menacing demographic balance. (True, in the Oslo agreement, Israel recognized the West Bank and the Gaza Strip as one integral territory, but the rightists consider the Oslo agreement anyhow as the tainted product of leftist traitors.)

Second: the one state will, of course, be a Jewish state.

Third: the annexation of the West Bank will take place at once, so that the building of settlements can go on undisturbed. In a Greater Israel, the settlement enterprise cannot be limited.

Fourth: There is no way to grant citizenship to all Palestinian forthwith.

The author of the article summarizes their positions thus: "a process that will take from about a decade to a generation, and at its conclusion the Palestinians will enjoy full personal rights, but the state will remain, in its symbols and spirit, Jewish…This is not a vision of 'a state belonging to all its citizens' and not 'Isratine' with a flag combining the crescent and the Star of David. The one state still means Jewish sovereignty."IT IS worthwhile to listen well to the explanations provided by the initiators themselves (emphasis added by me):

Uri Elitsur, former director general of the Judea and Samaria Council (the leadership of the settlers, known as "Yesha"): "I speak of a Jewish state which is the state of the Jewish people, and in which there will exist an Arab minority."

Hanan Porat, a founder of Gush Emunim (the religious settlers' leadership, and the man who called upon the Jews to rejoice after the Baruch Goldstein massacre in Hebron): "I am against the automatic citizenship proposed by Uri Elitsur, which is naïve and could lead to grievous consequences. I propose the application of Israeli law to the territories in stages, first in the areas in which there is (already) a Jewish majority, and within a time-span of a decade to a generation in all the territories."

Porat proposes dividing the Palestinians into three categories: (a) Those who want an Arab state and are ready to realize this by terrorism and struggle against the state – they have no place in Eretz Israel. Meaning: they will be expelled. (b) Those resigned to their place and to Jewish sovereignty, but not ready to take part in the state and fulfill all their obligations towards it – they will have full human rights, but no political representation in the institutions of the state. (c) Those who declare that they will be loyal to the state and swear allegiance to it – they will be granted full citizenship. (They will, of course, be a small minority.)

Tzipi Hutubeli, a Member of Parliament on the extreme fringe of Likud: "On the political horizon there must be citizenship for the Palestinians in Judea and Samaria…That will happen gradually …This process must take place over a long time, perhaps even a generation, in the course of which the situation on the ground will be stabilized and the symbols of the Jewish state and its character will be anchored in law…The question mark hovering over Judea and Samaria will be removed…First comes my deep belief in our right over Eretz Israel. Shiloh and Bet-El (in the West Bank) are for me the land of our ancestors in the full meaning of the term…At this moment we speak about conferring citizenship in Judea and Samaria, not in Gaza. Let it be clear: I do not recognize political rights of Palestinians over Eretz Israel…Between the sea and the Jordan there is room for one state, a Jewish state."

Moshe Arens: "The integration of the Arab population (inside Israel) into Israeli society is a prior condition, and only afterwards can one speak about citizenship for Palestinians in the territories." Meaning: Arens proposes focusing on the integration of the Arab citizens of Israel – something that has not happened in the last 62 years – and only afterwards thinking about the question of citizenship for the West Bank population.

Emily Amrussi, a settler who organizes meetings between the settlers and the Palestinians of the neighboring villages: "Don't describe me as one pushing for the 'one state'. In the end we may arrive there, but we are still very far from there. Let's talk first about one country…We don't talk about citizenship, but in terms like relations between neighbors… First let them become my good neighbors, and then we shall give them rights…In the far future, it will be necessary to move towards citizenship for everybody."

Reuven Rivlin, Speaker of the Knesset: "The country cannot be divided…I oppose the idea of a state belonging to all its citizens or a bi-national state and am thinking about arrangements of joint sovereignty in Judea and Samaria under the Jewish state, even a regime of two parliaments, Jewish and Arab…Judea and Samaria will be a co-dominion, held jointly…But these are things that take time…Stop waving demography in my face."

THE REGIME described here is not an apartheid state, but something much worse: a Jewish state in which the Jewish majority will decide if at all, and when, to confer citizenship on some of the Arabs. The words that come up again and again - "perhaps within a generation" - are by nature very imprecise, and not by accident.

But most important: there is a thunderous silence about the mother of all questions: what will happen when the Palestinians become the majority in the One State? That is not a question of "if", but of "when": there is not the slightest doubt that this will happen, not "within a generation", but long before.

This thunderous silence speaks for itself. People who do not know Israel may believe that the rightists are ready to accept such a situation. Only a very naive person can expect a repetition of what happened in South Africa, when the whites (a small minority) handed power over to the blacks (the large majority) without bloodshed.

We said above that it is impossible to "turn the triangle into a circle". But the truth is that there is one way: ethnic cleansing. The Jewish state can fill all the space between the sea and the Jordan and still be democratic – if there are no Palestinians there.

Ethnic cleansing can be carried out dramatically (as in this country in 1948 and in Kosovo in 1998) or in a quiet and systematic way, by dozens of sophisticated methods, as is happening now in East Jerusalem. But there cannot be the slightest doubt that this is the final stage of the one-state vision of the rightists. The first stage will be an effort to fill the entire country with settlements, and to demolish any chance of implementing the two-state solution, which is the only realistic basis for peace.

In Roman Polanski's movie "Rosemary's Baby", a nice young woman gives birth to a nice baby, which turns out to be the son of Satan. The attractive leftist vision of the one-state solution may grow up into a rightist monster.